


Five Years

by sinfuldesire_archivist



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-27
Updated: 2007-03-27
Packaged: 2018-09-03 10:56:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8709724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinfuldesire_archivist/pseuds/sinfuldesire_archivist
Summary: It's been five years.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Note from the Sinful Desire archivists: this story was originally archived at [Sinful-Desire.org](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Sinful_Desire). To preserve the archive, we began importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in November 2016. We e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact us using the e-mail address on [Sinful Desire collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/sinfuldesire/profile).

Title: Five Years  
Author: Impertinence  
Rating: R for language  
Pairing: Sam/Dean  
Warning: Disturbing content.  
Summary: It's been five years.  
  
  
  
Once upon a time, Snow White died and Ariel killed the prince. Once upon a time, Cinderella’s stepmother ordered her children to cut bits of themselves off. Once upon a time there was a knight who lost his armor and a dragon who knew everything.  
  
Once upon a time, fairy tales were painted in red honesty.  
  
||  
  
"Dude, pick up the phone."  
  
"Sammy."  
  
"Samcakes."  
  
"Samalamadingdong!"  
  
"...Sam?"  
  
"Fuck."  
  
||  
  
He keeps searching.  
  
Pictures, spells, prayer. Thirty states and counting. Knocking on doors, looking in windows, screaming the name at the top of his lungs on an empty highway that never answers back.  
  
Everyone he asks says the same thing: Lawrence? Never heard of it. Nope, haven't seen him. Good luck, man.  
  
Luck.  
  
Five years ago, Sam ripped open the sky and hurtled himself into it. Dean's not sure luck exists anymore.  
  
||  
  
It happens like this:  
  
The Demon's set a trap for them, a circle of runes that bind Dean and send pain racing through his body until he's on his knees, then on the ground, writhing and screaming.  
  
Sam draws the Aztec knife and charges the Demon, slashing wildly - but he's there a second too late, and the blade glows white-hot along the seam Sam's opened in reality. For a second Sam's eyes glow deep, dark red, and then the Demon's flying apart, bits and pieces hitting Dean's face with wet slaps. He opens his mouth to yell Sam's name and then Sam disappears, sucked into the vortex he created. The hollow sack of skin that's left of the Demon takes a step towards Dean, smiling, but then a hand reaches out and pulls it in and Dean's running forward but he's too late too slow too _stupid_ , because all he touches is thin air.  
  
He stands there until the cops come, until Jo shows up and slings enough bullshit for them to let her take him back to a motel room. He doesn't speak, doesn't move, not even when she strips him naked and shoves him into the shower. "You smell like shit," she says matter-of-factly, but Dean can't move and in the end she has to wash him off.  
  
She pushes him into bed and he stares at the ceiling, hoping the world will freeze and shatter, ice hit with a hammer on an icy cold winter day.  
  
||  
  
If Sam was here he'd laugh and kiss Dean and call him an idiot. If Sam was here then he'd be stupid and cheerful just to stop Dean from "turning into me, man. Pathetic.".  
  
But Sam's not here.  
  
The first week, Dean lies in bed. Jo brings him coffee and food, then water and food, then finally just water, until she walks into his room, dumps a bucket of ice-water over his head, and drives off.  
  
Finally, he gets up. Showers. Shaves. All the usual shit, on autopilot, very carefully almost-not-quite expecting Sam to walk in any minute.  
  
Then he goes to a bar and beats the shit out of six guys from a local biker gang.  
  
Dean's been to jail before, of course, but never when he couldn't bust out easy as breathing, or at the very least with Sam still on the outside, free. He's talking to ghosts and halfway to crazy by the time they let him go.   
  
He drives off: Arizona Texas Kentucky Carolina Maine and it's still not far enough so he heads into Canada, drives west again, until he's lost in the trees.  
  
Red eyes follow him everywhere, and they dance in the stars at night.  
  
||  
  
He drops weight. First it's just a bit and then it's more until finally he walks into the Roadhouse and Ellen blinks at him.  
  
'You've turned into a ghost, idiot," she says. "Sit the hell down."  
  
"Can't stop to talk, Ellen. On a job."  
  
"Yes, you damn well can," she says, and shoves him into a chair.  
  
He's up in the blink of an eye, switchblade out. "Back the fuck off," he snarls - but there's pistols cocked at him from every corner of the room, and Ellen's looking at him coldly down the long length of a shotgun.  
  
"Think hard, Dean," she says. "Sam wouldn't want this."  
  
Dean sneers and drops the knife. It lands, quivering, lodged in the wooden floor.  
  
"Good thing he's dead, then," he says, and leaves.  
  
||  
  
Days weeks months, and he almost thinks it's getting easier. People have learned to leave him alone; most people, at any rate.   
  
"You're like. A legend, man."  
  
"Ash, I told you not to call me."  
  
"I'm stoned. Can't be assed to remember."  
  
"Except how you do."  
  
"Whatever. Point is, everybody knows who you are."  
  
"Yeah, I know. John Winchester's son, the idiot who let his brother die."  
  
"Naw, man. Dean Winchester, the crazy hunter who's the subject of a ten thousand dollar bet."  
  
Dean thinks about that for a moment, twirling the gun in his right hand. Sammy'd be proud, he thinks, and doesn't smile. "Stakes?"  
  
"Who dies first, you or the demons."  
  
He'd like to laugh; he doesn't.  
  
||  
  
"Honey, you're gonna work yourself right on into the grave your brother tried to keep you from."  
  
Dean looks at Missouri and tries not to pull his knife on her. "You don't know -"  
  
"You're forgetting I can see all the ugly in your mind." The mug thunks down on the table solidly. "Killing me won't help a thing. He might still be out there, somewhere."  
  
"So you can't feel him."  
  
There's worry, compassion, and a million other things Dean only knows by dictionary definition anymore lurking in Missouri's eyes when she answers. "No, Dean. I'm sorry."  
  
He leaves without a backwards glance.  
  
||  
  
Five years. Five years and he's running out of jobs, out of _time_. Five years and he's gained nothing but a hell of a lot of death.  
  
Five years.  
  
"I've got a job for us," Jo says when he answers the phone.  
  
"Fuck that," Dean says, and lays another card down.  
  
"It's a big one," she says. "A cult in Mexico's been raising ghosts. They managed to awaken a priest from a few thousand years ago who wants to make the continent crumble into the ocean."  
  
The ash scorches the table when it falls from his cigarette. "Let 'em," he says lazily. "What's here that's worth saving?"  
  
Silence on the other end, and then: "You goddamned bastard."  
  
The dial tone is loud in his ear.  
  
||  
  
" _Where is he?_ "  
  
The demon smiles cooly. Dean's knife is at her throat, but somehow he feels cornered. "I saw him just the other day. He wanted me to let you know, you can't run from hell."  
  
||  
  
The FBI catches him off the coast of San Juan, lying in the sun.   
  
"Dean Winchester, you are under arrest for the murder of -"  
  
He raises his gun and shoots: once, twice, three times, until the bodies thud into the sand.  
  
"Next time," he tells them, standing up and looking down coldly, "make it a little harder."  
  
||  
  
She's looking at him with tearful eyes, trembling limbs. Her lips are open in a silent scream.  
  
The image would probably be more compelling if her eyes weren't dead black.  
  
"Goodnight, sweetheart," he says, and speaks the last Latin word.  
  
The demon leaves the body in a swirl of screaming blackness, right into the box Dean's set up for it. The boys back at the bar will love to poke around with this.  
  
The host's body falls to the ground and looks up at Dean, terror in her eyes. She sputters a few times, coughs blood, and falls to the floor, dead.  
  
He thinks about burying her, but there's not enough time. He's out of the town, speeding towards the bar, before her body's cold.  
  
||  
  
_Judgement Day has to come, sooner or later,_ the ghost whispers. _And the wicked fairy is always punished._  
  
Dean laughs, aims, and shoots. He doesn't notice the look Jo gives him as the ghost disappears with a satisfying scream.  
  
||  
  
"He's dangerous."  
  
"Volatile."  
  
"One of these days..."  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Happens to the best of us."  
  
"Always to the best."  
  
"He was good, though, before -"  
  
"Yeah. Kid held him together."  
  
"Sure seems like it."  
  
"Pity."  
  
"Yep."  
  
"Ace?"  
  
"Go fish."  
  
||  
  
He'll always wonder if Ash or Missouri or maybe even Jo, cold unsymapthetic Jo with the third degree burns and the new eyepatch, paid the demon to be such a fucking churchgoer.  
  
He'll always wonder what would've happened if he'd gone with Plan A and burned the church and its 26 regulars and moved on.  
  
He'll always wonder how much was truth when he told the priest he'd seen God.  
  
||  
  
Five years, eight months, ten days, two hours.  
  
If you're a kid and you meet a viscious dog, you stand still until it goes away. Everyone knows this.  
  
If you're Dean and you meet a viscious dog, you shoot it full of holes.  
  
"That's not very nice," a voice says from behind him, and Dean freezes.  
  
"It's not supposed to be, dumbfuck," he says, and yanks Sam into a hug.  
  
"God," he says, and Sam's arms are around him, _Sam,_ stupidly tall and smelling like graham crackers. " _God._ "  
  
"Doesn't exist, far's I can tell." Sam pulls away. There are wrinkles in the corners of his eyes. "How long?"  
  
"Five years," Dean says, and feels his knees buckle.  
  
Sam doesn't pull him back up but falls with him, onto his knees, letting Dean slump into him, cupping Dean's head with one hand and splaying the other across his back, pressing hard.  
  
"It felt like...shit. Forever," Sam says, and when Dean raises his head Sam's there, kissing him in a rush of wet heat that leaves Dean dizzy. Five years, _fuck_ five years and he can't remember letting anyone touch him.  
  
"Sammy," he says, breaking this kiss and running fingers over Sam's face, tracing his cheeks and his eyes and his mouth just to make sure they're _real,_ "Sam. I need -"  
  
Sam smiles, soft and gentle. "We can keep going," he says, "but not here."  
  
||  
  
Once upon a time, the end was the beginning.  
  
||  
  
"He's not dead."  
  
"He ain't _here,_ either. You're gonna have to let go, boy."  
  
"You've let him stay here for five years, please, just -"  
  
"Sam. You gotta learn when to let go."  
  
The drug Bobby slips him is quick and painless. Sam sits by his bedside, same as he has for five years, holding Dean's right hand with the four fingers he has left on each of his. But this time Dean's pulse slows, stutters, and dies.  
  
Sam presses a kiss to cold lips and leaves the room. Dean's necklace rests against his heart, and Dean's key's are in his pocket.  
  
Once upon a time.  
  
||


End file.
